Blog, Pitang.
Ricardo Peters
Business Agility: models and importance for the Institution
Agility
On one hand, investment in governance processes and structures; on the other, flexibility and autonomy to operate and better deal with complexity. An organization can no longer afford the luxury of cultivating agility only in IT; the entire business needs to have agility embedded in its DNA.
How does this dynamic affect the new way of working in organizations? How can we adapt to the changes that will be necessary to thrive in VUCA environments? And management? Is it still the domain solely of managers? Does my experience propel me into the future of work and management?
Let's better understand these questions, since the answers, each organization will have to discover on its own.
Business Agility
“Business Agility is the ability and willingness of an organization to adapt, create, and leverage change for the benefit of its customers!”
Evan Leybourn, “Chief Everything Officer”, Business Agility Institute (BAI)
Source: https://businessagility.institute/learn/
The Business Agility Institute Model
In the model proposed by the Business Agility Institute, we can see the customer as the central point of reference for value generation, an approach known as Customer Centric.
Around it, a board, partners, and the workforce work toward this goal. To develop the organization's ability to become the creative chameleon that leverages change in favor of its customers, three major domains must be observed: Individuals, Operations, and Leadership.
The focus is not to detail the model, but to reflect that, in the individual sphere, mastering a growth mindset, a sense of ownership, and accountability, in addition to developing excellence, are the focus areas.
Operations must focus on developing a structure aimed at agility, processes that provide direction rather than a straitjacket for agile practices (which are constantly evolving), and the commitment to adopting an agile mindset across the entire business, not just in IT.
The third essential piece is leadership, with an understanding of a new strategic model for complex environments, the “One Team” mindset, and genuinely learning how to engage with people and manage their talent to benefit the organization.
Many great people contributed to the formation of this line of thought. In the absence of a manifesto built by the community, they adopted the Agile Manifesto, swapping only one of the values from “working software” over comprehensive documentation to “value creation” over comprehensive documentation. This helps to show that agility is no longer just something heard about in IT.
Business Agility is an organization's ability to:
▶️ Adapt quickly to market changes—internally and externally
▶️ Respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands
▶️ Adapt and lead change in a productive and cost-effective way without compromising quality
▶️ Continually maintain a competitive advantage.”
Source: https://www.agilebusiness.org/page/WhatisBusinessAgility
The Agile Business Consortium Model
The Agile Business Consortium, on the other hand, places agile business changes at the center of its model. The agile portion refers to the portfolio, composed of agile programs and projects, and the evolution of agile products and services. To support change, the organizational structure and operations also need to migrate to a format that is more aligned with agility. This alignment covers five dimensions: People, Culture, Leadership, Strategy, and Governance, all with the prefix Agile.
The model also directly values the customer, but understands that leading and gaining advantage from change, adaptability, responsiveness, and flexibility are items on the agenda of truly agile organizations. This should not be done without a cost-benefit assessment and at the expense of quality and productivity.
“Business Agility is concerned with adopting the evolution of values, behaviors, and capabilities. These empower businesses and individuals to be more adaptable, creative, and resilient when dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and change, leading to improved well-being and better outcomes.”
Agile Business Consortium
Source: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/
“Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions.”
SAFe is one of the most well-known and robust frameworks when it comes to agility at an organizational scale. I was surprised to find a page (a very comprehensive one, by the way) speaking only about Business Agility and how the framework connects and provides support for its use in organizations.
Just like with the Business Agility Institute, the customer is at the center of everything. On one side, support structures direct focus toward the solutions offered (Enterprise Solution Delivery), Agile Product Delivery, and Team and Technical Agility. On the other, more organizational aspects, such as Lean Portfolio Management, Organizational Agility, and the creation and maintenance of a Continuous Learning Culture. At the center, serving as the foundation for the entire model, is Lean-Agile Leadership.
"Business Agility requires that everyone involved in delivering solutions—business and technology leaders, development, IT operations, legal, marketing, finance, support, compliance, security, and others—use Lean and Agile practices to continually deliver innovative, high-quality products and services faster than the competition."
Source: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/
Agility Goes Beyond IT
It is a fact that agility today goes beyond IT. How to make what we learned in the trenches of information technology spread throughout the entire organization has been the community's greatest challenge. The goal is to develop approaches and solutions that allow for minimal structure without creating constraints that hinder the evolution and maturity of truly agile organizational assets. These assets, in turn, have a lifecycle and will eventually become obsolete.
An agile mindset embedded in the organizational “DNA” is what will allow for the understanding and periodic reassessment of how well these assets fit the nuances of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous market.
